This blog is a repository of observations and random thoughts of someone with a serious case of wanderlust

Friday, May 17, 2013

A Trip Down the Keys Highway

Below is a proposed chapter for the book "A Quest for Counties." It deals with the Florida Keys (Monroe County) and recounts a real tale from the summer of 1984 in Marathon. This is indicative of how I would like the other chapters in the book to read and to flow. Let me know if this works for you as a reader:

11

“If They Shoot,
Shoot Back”

Vaca Key, Monroe County, Florida

(Portions of this chapter appeared previously in Faanes,
Craig, 2001. Somewhere South of Miami.
America House Publishers, Baltimore)

About 100,000 people call themselves permanent residents
of the Florida Keys. Some times on
weekends during winter when there are more visitors than residents of Florida
in Florida it may seem like there are 100 million residents in the Keys. It seems that a trip down the Keys highway is
now a required pilgrimage for everyone; it’s no longer a requirement just of
Jimmy Buffett fans.

The Keys hold a special place in the history and folklore
and the current-day psyche of Florida.
From the days of pirates there has always been an outlaw meme to the
Keys. No matter who was in charge or
from where they were in charge, side stepping the rules and doing things
differently was the norm in the Keys.

Henry Flagler and his long-sought Overseas Railroad
probably had the longest lasting impression on the makeup of the Keys. Through the trials, tribulations and travails
of tens of thousands of men, Flagler oversaw the building of his dream railroad
down the spine of the islands. Logistics
of this endeavor remain an awe-inspiring feat especially when you consider the
state of technology in the early 20th century with our contemporary
ability to build structures like the Sunshine Skyway crossing the mouth of
Tampa Bay and to accomplish that task in just a few months.

Flagler’s railroad opened the door for many to travel
where few had gone before. Originally
designed to be a conduit for trade goods to be loaded to and unloaded from
ships traveling between Key West and Panama or Colombia, the railroad soon
eclipsed expectations with the sheer number of visitors that passed through the
Keys. Marketed early and often as
“America’s Caribbean Islands” industrialists and other ultra-rich northerners
flocked to the Keys to escape the Arctic conditions further north in winter.

Keys tourism continued to flourish through the 1920s but
the Great Depression took its toll in the early 1930s. Adding more insult to additional injury was
the famous Labor Day hurricane of 1935 that completely changed the face and the
structure of the Keys for years to come.
Roaring ashore on September 2 1935 and still pumping out energy on
September 4 when it moved away, the Great Hurricane left the Keys and Flagler’s
railroad in a complete shambles.
Internal pressures recorded with the storm remain among the lowest ever
observed on earth. Topping it off was a
18-foot high tidal wave that roared ashore cleansing everything in its path and
leaving utter chaos behind it.

As is the nature of humans, Keys residents didn’t let the
Great Hurricane hold them down for long and repairs were quickly made. A major change from the days of Flagler was
that this famous railroad was not replaced.
Instead, built over the bed of that rail line was what is now known as
the end of U.S. Highway 1, the “Keys Highway” or the “Overseas Highway.” Its presence today allows for hundreds of
thousands of visitors to pass into the Keys and in most instances to bring
along with them the toys of modernity that they sought to escape on the
mainland.

Although the railroad is gone and it has been replaced by
the highway, Monroe County and the Keys remain a safe haven for eccentrics who
enjoy life at the end of the road. Many
Keys residents moved there to get away from the rules and regulations that
govern life everywhere else. Only on
their arrival they discovered that despite their protestations, the rules and
the regulations still apply. Long-time
residents of the Keys call themselves “Conch’s,” a reference to the Queen
conch, a massive marine snail whose flesh is a delicacy. Referring to someone in the Keys as a “Conch”
is like a badge of honor, and referring to that person as “an old Conch” is
akin to having been present when Moses found the tablets on the top of a
mountain in the Middle East.

Given their escapist mentality, many Keys residents
believe they should be their own governmental entity away from and in spite of
the United States, the state of Florida, or Monroe County. I’m sure they feel that way until there is a
natural disaster like a hurricane and they need financial assistance but that
is another story. In the early 1980s at
the height of one of a million controversies created by Ronald Reagan and his
disreputable Administration (and quickly swept under the table by a protective
media) was the decision by a group of Keys residents to break away from the
United States in protest of Reagan and to create their own little country to be
known as “The Conch Republic.” To this
day you can still purchase “Conch Republic” license plates and “Conch Republic”
flags. Someone in Miami still produces
and sells “Conch Republic” passports so if you want to be a dual citizen
without leaving the comforts of America, you can purchase a passport and travel
the world as a Conch.

On the day the Keys declared their independence from all
government around them, then-Florida Governor Bob Graham was scheduled to land
at the Marathon airport for some function.
When he arrived and was informed of that he was now in a sovereign
nation (at least in the mind of those who created this sovereign nation) Governor
Graham asked politely at the airport if he needed a passport to be there. Nobody was sure if he did or not.

My first visit to Monroe County was in July 1984 when I
was conducting research on an endangered species of bird that nests in Michigan
and winters in the West Indies. We
wanted to put tiny radio transmitters on the backs of the birds and track their
movements but before doing so we wanted to practice on a more widespread and
more numerous common species and we wanted to do this in habitats and humidity
similar to what we would occur a few months later in the West Indies.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service maintains and manages four
National Wildlife Refuges in the Florida Keys and we made arrangements to
conduct our research on the Big Pine Key and No Name Key units of the National
Key Deer Refuge. Despite this being the
latter half of the 20th century there were still all sorts of crooks
and thieves and low-life’s in the keys and especially on weekends. Given the extensive area of open ocean that
surrounds the Keys they were (and remain) a prime location for drug runners to
attempt to bring their products into the country. The ever-vigilant U.S. Coast Guard maintained
offices at both Marathon and Key West and one of their responsibilities in 1984
was drug interdiction. To do so they
needed to be out on the open ocean looking for bad guys. I saw this as an opportunity to get out on
the open ocean to look for birds I had not seen before that live on the edge of
the Gulf Stream. A quick stop at Station
Marathon one day confirmed that I could go along with the Coast Guard on their
Saturday foray out into the Gulf Stream from Marathon. We never got that far.

When I arrived at Station Marathon I was given a quick
briefing on how to keep from being thrown overboard if we encountered rough
seas. Afterward we took off to look for
birds in the cobalt blue waters of the Gulf Stream. The Coast Guard was out
there to aid stranded boaters and to check safety equipment and to look for
drugs and contraband. I was along simply
for a Saturday morning of looking at birds.
Not long after leaving the Station, we received a call instructing us to
be on the lookout for a stolen boat.
Hearing this, the boat’s captain knew exactly where to look and we
changed course for the “Cuban Docks” on Vaca Key. Apparently if you are going to rip someone
off and try to hide afterward the most logical place to try to hide was the
Cuban Docks.

We had a description of the boat but to me they all
looked the same. As we made our approach
to the docks the Coast Guardsmen asked me to stand in the bow of their boat
with my binoculars so I could read the registration numbers on those other
boats we passed. This was exciting at first but soon it became boring. That all changed when we came on to a
thirty-foot shrimp boat because sitting in its wheel house was a simple, lone,
unassuming marijuana plant that was growing in a bucket. Not thinking much of it I casually mentioned
to the Captain that there was a marijuana plant in that boat and was he
interested in it? He took my binoculars,
looked at the potted pot plant, and exclaimed, “I’m going to seize that boat!”

Our plans changed again when the pot plant was
found. First we docked the Coast Guard
vessel next to the shrimp boat and kept it under surveillance. Then we radioed the U.S. Customs Service and
the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department to alert them to our find and both
groups said they would send backup. This
was followed by the rather dramatic laying on of guns. Two of the four Coast Guardsmen were
designated the boarding party. It was
their responsibility in these situations to board boats and look for contraband. The boarding party strapped on their .45
caliber revolvers and waited for Customs and the Sheriff to arrive. In the mean time I stood with the other two
Coast Guardsmen wondering what would happen next.

Arrival of the reinforcements meant that the boarding
party could jump into action and as they approached the shrimp boat, one of the
two Coast Guardsmen still on the boat went below decks and came out carrying
three 12 gauge shotguns. He handed one
shotgun to the boat captain and then loaded a shell in the chamber of the
second gun and kept it for himself. He
then turned to me.

The last thing I considered that morning when I got out
of bed was that I would be in a shootout with drug runners on Vaca Key but that
is what it was beginning to appear was going to happen. I wanted this as much as I wanted a toothache
but I wasn’t going to argue.

The boarding party, made up of two Coast Guardsmen, a
Customs agent and a deputy sheriff approached the shrimp boat with their guns
drawn. As instructed I stood in the bow
of the boat with the 12 gauge shotgun aimed at the wheel house of the
boat. It was my responsibility to shoot
if anyone shot first. Between them the
four-person boarding party had enough armaments to support a small insurgency
in Nicaragua yet as they made their way to the shrimp boat I maintained my aim
at the unseen doper inside.

With guns drawn the boarding party walked up to the main
door of the shrimp boat and yelled at the occupants to come out. Nobody inside moved. They yelled again and still nobody
moved. At the conclusion of the third
yelling session, one of the Coast Guardsmen on the boat kicked in the door. I flicked off the safety on my shotgun. The entire scene reminded me of a script for
some surreal movie but it was real life and real time.

No shots rang out as the four men entered the shrimp boat
to confiscate the lone marijuana plant in the wheel house. After what seemed like an hour inside they returned
to the main door leading a rather disheveled individual who was shirtless and
shoeless (this was the Florida Keys after all) man with scraggly hair. His arms were securely behind his back and
his wrists were held together by hand cuffs.
The Customs Agent yelled at us and told us they had found some cocaine
on the table along with the supposedly malevolent marijuana plant. He also informed us that we could take down
our arms and prepare to tie off the boat.

With the boat shrimp boat secured to the Coast Guard
cutter we slowly made our way back to Coast Guard Station Marathon where it was
tied off and guarded by another Coast Guardsman who proceeded to do about face
marches in front of the boat. It was his
responsibility to ensure that nobody came near that shrimp boat unless they
were personally known to the Coast Guardsman.
Should some nefarious individual attempt to board the boat before the
Customs Service could tear it apart, it was this Coast Guardsman’s responsibility
to shoot that person. Hearing this I
made it triply certain that no matter where I walked for the rest of my time on
the Coast Guard station I had someone with me who personally knew the man
walking about faces in front of the shrimp boat.

The shrimp boat incident in the Cuban Docks severely cut
into our time on the ocean but the Coast Guard had made a promise to me that
they would get me offshore to look for birds.
After maybe two hours of paperwork and interviews we again left the dock
headed for the open ocean. As we passed
under Seven Mile Bridge we received a call from Marathon but instead of telling
us to go back to the Cuban Docks to look for another boat, it was Coast Guard
Station Marathon wishing us a successful trip to find birds.

We didn’t find many birds because by the time we arrived
on the Gulf Stream the winds had kicked up and the waves were horrendous and
there was little else for us to do but ride out the tempest. I suggested several times that we return to
shore but the Coast Guard had promised me time on the ocean and they were bound
and determined to give it to me. After an hour in the rollicking angry ocean we
had two Coast Guardsmen down with sea sickness and the other two were beginning
to look green. Rather than subject them to more discomfort I begged them to
take us back to shore. I could always
get offshore another time to look for birds.

Our return to the station was greeted with high fives and
congratulations because on dismantling the inside of the boat, Customs and the
Coast Guard found several large packages of cocaine tethered to the inside
walls. Today’s action turned out to be
the best bust of the month for Coast Guard Station Marathon and it all started
with an off-handed remark about a single marijuana plant growing in a bucket in
the wheel house. As I was preparing to
leave Marathon and return to Big Pine Key I asked one of the Coast Guardsmen if
they didn’t come off a little too extreme in dealing with the shrimp boat owner
at first because on the surface it appeared he had just one pot plant. The Coast Guardsman snickered a bit and said “When
you deal with low life’s every day you have to treat everyone like they’re
going to kill you.”

I have had nothing but the utmost respect for the Coast
Guard since that day.